A Lapse
by Lady Nightspike
Summary: "What she needed lay so close to her, waiting, its furious heart beating against the door of its prison, that it sometimes grew difficult to force herself to walk the steps to her bed at night." Tyrande deals with the long years of waiting for Malfurion by asking herself if she made the right choice.


**I don't own anything, but here is this story.**

* * *

 **A Lapse**

Just this once, she needed it.

She smoothed her hair back from her face and swept her hands down her hips, flattening the dress that had rode up as she walked the short distance to his prison. It had been a long time since she had worn it, and she had forgotten how it punished its wearer. She knew she was as beautiful as she had been in her youth, despite the thousands of years that had passed; she knew, also, that the bonds made in youth are never easily broken. When she had been as sexless as the sky and they—all three, _always_ three—had frolicked underneath that lawless ocean, she had never considered choosing.

But Tyrande Whisperwind had chosen, and they had all suffered for it.

She stopped in her tracks as she gazed on the door to Illidan's domain. She envied Malfurion, lost for centuries inside his Emerald Dream, incapable of being the Malfurion she had grown up with, let alone the Malfurion she had married. Even when his eyes fell on her, soon followed by his hands, she knew she could never compete with the potency of the dream.

What she needed lay so close to her, waiting, its furious heart beating against the door of its prison, that it sometimes grew difficult to force herself to walk the steps to her bed at night. The tingling caused her body to shudder along her ribs down into her pelvis. She grabbed at her throat, feeling her chest rise and fall underneath her straight, fearful arm. Her voice hoarse, she whispered, "I could never choose." Like many other secrets, it lay hidden beneath her silken dress, her smooth face.

She turned away at the last moment, curling her fist at the sight of her front door.

* * *

Nights and years passed and she grew tired. With Malfurion, nothing ever changed. "Tonight is the last night for a long time," he said with a coy smile as he lingered in her arms. He stared at her not as a lover might, but as a man recovering aspects of his past from amnesia. Tyrande knew, even as he folded into her and whispered her name, that she was the dream to him, and that the secretive magic realm he devoted himself to was reality.

 _She was only_ , she thought as later she washed the stains of him from her legs, _a pleasant diversion_.

Her sobbing turned her to thoughts of Illidan, whose chances had always come when she was at her lowest. When she was young, Malfurion's sudden absence had tilted the balance in her heart, and _she had known_ that they were meant to be. Illidan had been the one to comfort her then, and she had acted with the certainty that he always would. Tyrande wanted to feel the spark that had drawn her to Malfurion and sealed their fates—wanted desperately to recapture the magic of man and woman that she knew she could feel, but all she could feel now, after the parody of intimacy—spread thin over centuries—was the pain of being stretched too far.

As she retreated to her bed, she wondered what hungers the millennia had instilled in Illidan, what hatred, what passion, what love burned in him. She imagined him preserved in the prison, grown more perfect over time. But Illidan had new textures, facets her fingers had not explored.

Nights and years more passed, and Malfurion did not return.

* * *

…she opened the door to Illidan's prison, knowing what she would find. Knowing that, despite himself, Illidan could never not give her what she needed. Her hands trembled and she opened her mouth to call out into the darkness...

 _And she will leave, and she will know she chose wrong, and he will know it too, and it will take root in their hearts for years to come, because as easily as it could all come undone, to do so now would be more wrong than to not do so, and so they will go on as they have ever been._


End file.
